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10x Engineer

medium.com

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Re: 10x Engineer

#131

Post by azakai »

gruseom wrote: post #116

I just realized what was bugging me about this article. It points out that the empirical support for 10x claims is shoddy. That's fair enough. But then it switches to making a bunch of claims that have no empirical support: 10x is a myth, it's pernicious, it may lead to drug abuse, etc. So which is it? If we're going to hold 10x up to the standards of rigorous research and conclude that it's bullshit, then by the sam…

Well said. Without objective evidence, we should be open to the possibility of this being true or false.

However, as various people commented here, and I can attest as well, there are engineers who are orders of magnitude better than others. It's plainly obvious when you meet them and work with them for enough time to see.

So the interesting thing is why some people disbelieve their existence. If they haven't met such engineers, that is fine - they should be skeptical until they see evidence. But it is irrational for them to discount the eyewitness evidence of others.

So the really interesting issue here is why some people, like the article, want to deny the existence of such engineers. Are they threatened by them or something along those lines? I'm not sure.

(And of course "10x" is meaningless literally, etc. etc. But programming is a human activity, and we can measure our fellow humans despite how complex we are; for example we can say that some authors of fiction are hugely better than the average, such a thing is not even debatable.)

Re: 10x Engineer

#132

Post by nandemo »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #94
taybin wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a misleading summary. No one is saying that all engineers are equal.

Huh? The article repeatedly calls the 10x assertion 'mythology'. It disingenuously tries to 'debunk' the history of this assertion while blithely ignoring testimony from throughout the industry.

Besides, OP challanges the 10x programmer notion on the basis that there are methodological issues in the papers and books, and then goes on to list... a series of tweets.

Re: 10x Engineer

#133

Post by eloff »

alexmayyasi wrote: post #62
jandrewrogers wrote: post #24

While the article correctly highlights the lack of rigorous scientific studies on 10x engineers, it also generalizes a bit too much from anecdote to make the argument that they are mythical creatures. A more reasonable argument is that the hypothetical existence of 10x engineers explains little about the productivity of most organizations. Personally, in the couple decades I have been in this business working in coun…

I would argue that the 10x engineer isn't a myth - the myth is that these 10x more productive employees are unique to engineering whereas they can really be found across industries. My starting point is this study by biz school professors (unfortunately paywalled) about how power law distributions define employees in sales, scientific research, entertainment, and really much of skilled labor: http://onlinelibrary.wil…

I've seen it in my workplace. We're very particular about who we hire, but even so the best hires have been more than 10x as productive as the worst over the course of a year. It's definitely a real thing.

Re: 10x Engineer

#134

Post by CamperBob2 »

tdees40 wrote: post #49

I think the free market mostly answers this question. According to indeed.com, the average software engineer salary is $91K. So obviously a company (assuming they could properly identify them) would pay $910K/year to a 10x programmer. Are there people out there making that for pure coding (i.e. not management)? Maybe, but it seems doubtful. I would think that generally 99.9999% of programmers make less than $400K if…

So obviously a company (assuming they could properly identify them) would pay $910K/year to a 10x programmer.

The 10x-100x engineers tend to have names like Carmack and Torvalds. So, yes, they tend to get what they're worth, in the end.

Re: 10x Engineer

#135

Post by exue »

alexmayyasi wrote: post #62
jandrewrogers wrote: post #24

While the article correctly highlights the lack of rigorous scientific studies on 10x engineers, it also generalizes a bit too much from anecdote to make the argument that they are mythical creatures. A more reasonable argument is that the hypothetical existence of 10x engineers explains little about the productivity of most organizations. Personally, in the couple decades I have been in this business working in coun…

I would argue that the 10x engineer isn't a myth - the myth is that these 10x more productive employees are unique to engineering whereas they can really be found across industries. My starting point is this study by biz school professors (unfortunately paywalled) about how power law distributions define employees in sales, scientific research, entertainment, and really much of skilled labor: http://onlinelibrary.wil…

Paints a great+balanced high-level picture picture of the phenomena - I noticed it was submitted a few weeks ago without much attention. I'd also add reading about TopCoder and IOI / various competitions - star performers in another, highly measurable, field. Sometimes, absolute skill differences at the top may be small but in a competition environment lead to huge result disparities in wins/losses (see sports or eSports - every small advantage matters). Though mosts aspects of engineering aren't highly competitive, I'd argue similar features such as need for creativity or logically difficult problems, produce the power-law-like distribution.

Rereading the Medium piece now draws me to its relative lack of citation especially in the moral arguments toward the end, with a lot of judgments on a shaky empirical ground.

Re: 10x Engineer

#136

Post by gruseom »

btilly wrote: post #119

I find it sad that this article leaves out the (admittedly unpublished) research on the 10x phenomena, which is described in Peopleware . They consistently found 10x differences between experienced programmers on the same task, with the same tools. I find that particular research important for three reasons. 1. The 10 fold difference was consistently demonstrated many times. 2. Their research was conducted with profe…

Much as I like Peopleware, it isn't credible as research. The studies were never published, and the authors made stuff up, as one of them told me himself (I'll see if I can dig up the link where I wrote about it.)

Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1995716. It sounds mean and accusatory to say on an internet message board that they made stuff up. But actually, our brief exchange was charming. He said it with a twinkle in his eye.

Re: 10x Engineer

#137

Post by daemon13 »

waps wrote: post #102
gvr wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This resonated with me. If the programming tasks are somewhat mechanical/procedural, I am not sure that an exceptional engineer can create 10x as much value as a quite good one. I've never seen it. What I've seen several times are engineers that are able to tackle problems that require so much creativity or skill that giving them to a less qualified engineer would most likely be a waste of everyone's time. In instanc…

I've worked at a lot of places and I clearly see it. It isn't very hard being a "10x" engineer if you look at the average programmer profile : Arrive at 9:30, start out with 30 minutes at the coffee machine. They get mad if you discuss work at this point, or god forbid, talk about interesting algorithms or the like. They expect to be told exactly what to do, or they won't even sit down. If you don't give them an exac…

In my humble opinion the guy is a great engineer who is bored (by lack of challenging projects) and discouraged (by less than stellar teammates).

It is rather easy to check though - you should forget about time spent on work and need to compare the outcome, i.e. result, of this guy vs every other engineer on the team.

If the check above shows that this guy is better than everybody else, than this:

>> Alarmingly often, he'd have hacker news, or dzone open and would be reading articles (I mean 50%+ of the time, not once or twice a day).

and this:

>> More than one of his coworkers have mentioned something along the lines of "can't we fire him 4 weeks out of 5 ?".

indicates one simple thing - he is not managed properly by his manager and by the company.

It as simple as that...

Re: 10x Engineer

#138

Post by altero »

Lets put it other way. Why someone should produce 10x more work, even if she/he could? Salary would be probably only 20% higher. And there is a huge pile of disadvantages (no holidays, extra support...). It is also career limiting move as someone becomes irreplaceable and can not get promoted.

Re: 10x Engineer

#139

Post by danmaz74 »

For a given task, at a given time, there are for sure engineers that are 10x, or even 100x, compared to some other engineers. But that doesn't make them absolute "10x engineers", it's always relative to the task and the other engineers.

Re: 10x Engineer

#140

Post by gaius »

mathattack wrote: post #78
jandrewrogers wrote: post #24

While the article correctly highlights the lack of rigorous scientific studies on 10x engineers, it also generalizes a bit too much from anecdote to make the argument that they are mythical creatures. A more reasonable argument is that the hypothetical existence of 10x engineers explains little about the productivity of most organizations. Personally, in the couple decades I have been in this business working in coun…

I feel obliged to toss in Joel's commentary... http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/HighNotes.html His commentary about "hitting the high notes" was new to me. It isn't just that 10x people are faster and make less mistakes, they also can do things that others can't. This doesn't mean that you have to ignore culture, and tolerate bad behavior. But it does mean that in software it is worth the effort and cost to cha…

Question: how many 10x engineers want to work on a bug tracking tool? Is it likely Joel has met many of these guys, or is he just telling the audience what it wants to hear for some more page views?
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